It's time to wake up to the world and the time that we live in

Archive for May 2014

One of the stated key objectives of Edward Snowden was to see a public debate about the spying being undertaken by the NSA and other agencies in the United States on the American public. There has certainly been discussion in many circles, and clearly one perceived objective was to see more control exercised over the NSA’s activities. This interview with Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bills of Rights Defense Committee, suggests the behind closed doors horse-trading will likely see the colour of the drapes changed, but very little substantive reform, just as Steve Pieczenik predicted. As the interview says, there are still more steps in the process, but the reality of the American political process would lead us to expect no substantive progress, and perhaps even more freedom granted to the NSA and others through the back door.

What has changed is the understanding of how many complicit companies and other players there are, and the individual or business needs to be willing to take responsibility for encrypting their data and communications in a trusted manner. The degree to which this is being done, along with serious efforts to find and close the security backdoors in mainstream products, along with substantial new development efforts to produce highly secure, easy to use public tools is very encouraging. Decent encryption will make it much more difficult for these goons, even with their massive decrypting supercomputers.

Gone are the days of naivety when the public expected Western if not other governments to treat their citizens with any respect or privacy, or to act in their best interests. Not before time.

In my experience, few understand the origin of the term “conspiracy theory” – the CIA.

As its discourse suggests, this propaganda campaign is using the now familiar “conspiracy theory” label, as outlined in Central Intelligence Agency Document 1035-960, the 1967 memo laying out a strategy for CIA “media assets” to counter criticism of the Warren Commission and attack independent investigators of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. At that time the targets included attorney Mark Lane and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who were routinely defamed and lampooned in major US news outlets.

Declassified government documents have proven Lane and Garrison’s allegations of CIA-involvement in the assassination largely accurate. Nevertheless, the prospect of being subject to the conspiracy theorist smear remains a potent weapon for intimidating authors, journalists, and scholars from interrogating complex events, policies, and other potentially controversial subject matter.

Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email provider Lavabit, details why he was forced to shut down his company last summer after the U.S. government attempted to seize Edward Snowden’s email information and much more. The FBI was targeting Snowden after he exposed the National Security Agency’s surveillance to the world, but in doing so effectively wanted access to the accounts of 400,000 other Lavabit customers. Levison was barred from discussing the case in detail at the time, saying only that he had refused “to become complicit in crimes against the American people.” Earlier this week, a federal judge unsealed key parts of the record detailing the government’s requests from Lavabit, freeing Levison to talk more openly about what happened. “The government was telling bold-faced lies,” Levison says. “It was impossible to trust them with the access they wanted. The only option was to shut down or to become complicit in what they were seeking — the mass surveillance of my customers.”

If my experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already know: courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved one find yourself in a position like I did – standing in a secret courtroom, alone, and without any of the meaningful protections that were always supposed to be the people’s defense against an abuse of the state’s power.

In truth, the US Government has hidden abuses under the guise of “National Security” since 1947, and perhaps Levison should compare notes with Susan Lindauer, who was treated exactly as he describes under the Patriot Act right after its introduction to stop her from telling what she knew about 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Who knows how many others there are we don’t know about?

The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, an American geneticist has suggested.

The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, who is also one of the world’s leading authorities on hybridisation in animals.

He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates.

These experiments reflect a sad lack of understanding of the true nature of life and how humanity came to be on Earth. As I’ve said before, this work is so reminiscent of the abuses conducted at the end of what we know of as Atlantean times. There are those with the past life recall to be able to share these events with us.

In my view it is, in its own way, a marker that this cycle is completing and we are about to move on beyond it.